Tuesday, February 16, 2010

No, I don’t love the round orbs used as garden decoration. I do lurve some good oil rubbed bronze spray paint! (“ORB” to us spray paint obsessed folk.)

I know – the picture above isn’t of the oil rubbed stuff. It’s the end of the day and I’m just plain lazy right now. Just pretend that can has a brown lid, umkay?

I almost had a conniption last year because my trusty Rustoleum bronze spray paint was disappearing off the shelves. Many of you Squeezies actually contacted Rustoleum and there was a bit of scuttlebutt but very little of actual cans on the shelves. I have yet to find that brand in ORB again.

Whatev. I have found it recently at Walmart in this Krylon brand. It doesn’t cover quite as well as the Rustoleum did, but I’m happy with it overall!

I showed you how I used oil rubbed bronze paint on our vents:

I wasn’t sure how this would hold up to the meeellions of fire trucks, trains and race cars that get run over this spot daily…but it still looks great! I’m super impressed.

Because I’ve noticed a trend – that I can spray just about anything in this color and I LOVE how it turns out – I tackled this frame the other day:

I’ve been meaning to do this for at LEAST a year. So sorry for no before pics of it hanging on the wall – I got a wild hair tojust do it for goodness sakes the other day, and I was too excited to pause to take a true before pic. ;)

Anyhoo, I taped the edges of the art, then covered the rest with a shopping bag, then did a few coats of ORB and got this:

I LOVE how it pops off the wall now! The gold color was SO blah on our walls. It had annoyed me for so very long. Now – you actually SEE it! I love how the dark frame now picks up on the darker tones in the art:

And when I say “art” – I mean “$20-something print from Stein Mart.”

I am slowly (very, very slowly) changing out all of our light fixtures to the ORB finish:

This one I bought as is, but you can easily update a fixture with the spray paint too! I am happy to announce that we have ZERO shiny brass light fixtures left in this house!!!

Can I get an AMEN??? ;)

But we do still have a few brushed nickel lights – which I don’t mind, but I do want to get them all the same metallic tone someday.

I’m hoping to order all new beautiful, fantastic, luscious, dark ORB knobs from eBay in the next month or so. I’ll let you know how that goes. ;)

I was on such a oil rubbed bronze high from the art (figuratively, not literally), I decided to pop off the brass handles on our sliding closet doors in anticipation of the new knobs throughout the rest of the house:

Let’s just say it didn’t go as planned. ;) I’ll let you know how they turn out. Keep in mind they are shaped like a bowl. Which means it takes a VERY light, quick spray, or it just kind of puddles up in the “bowl.” I was a little heavy on the “quick” and “light” sprays. Just FAB. Gah.

For all of these items, the only prep I did was to clean them. If they will get a lot of use, you could use a primer before to ensure it will hold up well. But I haven’t had an issues with scratching or chipping on any of my projects – just be sure to let them dry long enough before handling!

So have you been bitten by the ORB bug? Or are you a brushed nickel kind of girl? Or the antique brass? (Which I actually quite like.) OR – do you really really love your shiny brass? :)